The celestial meadow of Hubert van Eyck[92] has grouped trees as in a park and bushes covered with roses, and there are roses on bushes and trellises, crowns of roses and roses woven into swinging garlands in that most alluring of all painted paradises set by Benozzo Gozzoli upon the walls of the Palazzo Riccardi.[93] ‘Roses and pomegranates, their leaves drawn to the last rib and vein, twine themselves in fair and perfect order about delicate trellises; broad stone-pines and tall cypresses overshadow them; bright birds hover here and there in the serene sky; and groups of angels glide and float through the glades of an entangled forest.’[94] It is a paradise after the own heart of a Medici, in which no monotony, no boredom need be apprehended, full of gay and witty folk and the most gorgeous angels that were ever seen. The roses of Paradise must not be confused with the rose hedge or trellis so often placed behind the Virgin by the early German schools. These hedges indicate the ‘Hortus Conclusus’ and identify the Virgin with the bride of the Canticles by recalling the verse, ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse.’ This enclosure is sometimes fenced merely by a row of flowers, sometimes by a fortress-wall, and is often an elaborate garden. An early instance by a master of the Middle Rhine,[95] dating from about 1420, gives eighteen recognizable species of flowers and ten varieties of birds. The Madonna sits reading beneath a tree. One saint gathers cherries and another draws water from a fountain. Saint George, Saint Michael and a young man chat beneath a tree, and a pretty young saint with flowers in her hair teaches the little Christ to play the psaltery. Other gardens contain no flowers but the various objects used as similes of the Virgin--the Tower of Ivory, the Closed Door, the Sealed Fountain, etc. Very often there is merely a trellis with roses climbing up it, and the flowers which express the virtues of Mary, the lily, violet and strawberry, grow at her feet. The thorns on the roses are carefully drawn, even accentuated, illustrating the verse, ‘As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters;’[96] but in spite of the thorns the general significance of these roses also is joy and delight. In the Netherlands, where theologians occupied themselves less with this second chapter of the Song of Solomon, Madonnas set _en plein air_ are scarcely found. The van Eycks and Memling inaugurated the fashion of arranging their devotional groups in chapel-like niches, or in the aisle of some large church. Any garden there is seen in glimpses between pillars or through windows, and has no mystical meaning. [Illustration: _Stefano da Zevio_ _Photo Anderson_ THE ‘ENCLOSED GARDEN’ OF THE VIRGIN (Royal Museum, Verona)]